Using Social Office

This wiki is intended to help you understand a little bit more about Liferay Social Office and what it can do for you. As you know, Liferay Social Office is a social collaboration solution for the enterprise. From the start, the goal of Social Office was to allow people to collaborate effectively and efficiently. Beginning with the installation, and continuing on into the product itself, Social Office is very user friendly. To use it you do not need to be very tech savvy and is quite easy to install.

This is the user's homepage. The left side of the page lists the communities or sites the user belongs to as well as a button to add sites if you are the admin. The right side of the page has three view activity options, My sites, My Friends and Me. My sites lists all the recent activities for the sites that you belong to. My friends lists the recent activities for your friends and Me lists all of your (the logged in user's) activities.

Once logged in you want to start by creating communities. These are essentially mini-sites that are used to collaborate on. You can create sites for any grouping of people who want to collaborate together including but not limited to, specific departments within a business (e.g., marketing, sales, or pr), groups of co-workers across departments (e.g., those who are organizing the company-wide summer bbq), and specific projects (e.g., Product Alpha, Beta, or Delta) that will also have members from many departments within a company collaborating on it. Once a community is created you can start adding content to that site. Click on the My Sites button on the top right to navigate to the sites you belong to. Once you've navigated to a site you are presented with a set of pre-defined pages for that site. The advantage to this is not having to spend time populating your site with pages and collaboration portlets or worrying about layout. You can just set it up and go, literally the ability to start working as soon as you sign on. Once there is no more need for a particular site, (e.g., The summer bbq is over) the admin can just delete the site and create a new one for the next collaborative need. You can see from this screen shot that three communities or sites were created, one for marketing, one for events and one for a project named Alpha.

This is the home page of the marketing community we created. It is here that you can see all of the latest activities of users within this community. If you need to know what people are doing this is where you would go to see an aggregated list of all their activities.

The Calendar page allows you to see all of the events, appointments, meetings, and such that are associated with that particular community. As admin you can automatically add and edit events in the calendar.

The Forums page is where you can find that site's message board. A list of quick links is displayed on the left side of the page. This allows you to quickly navigate right to the content you want to see. As with the documents, blog, and wiki pages, a section with related content is on the right side of the page. This automatically brings up all content that is tagged with the same tag as the content you are currently viewing.

I was hoping SO would come with Control Panel active as we intended using it internal to our company as our Intranet portal, and we were familiar with the SE Control Panel which we currently use for client portals. Is there any way of activating CP on the SO version of the Standard Edition or is this simply not included? The current SO starting point presented to administrators and users after installation is so different from the SE version that we face some uphill in convincing them that it is the same platform (keeping in mind that we are very new users for both versions).

I would like to have all my community members be able to edit the calendar for example and add events. What is the best way to do this, other than making everybody an Administrator I was trying to set a specific role when associating a user to the community (like Community Owner) but did not find a way to do it. By default, all users assigned to the community get the community member role.

Bryan: i looked around and could not find a place to post this question:i have installed SO1.5b and am very very happy with what i see. how do i modify the sign in page (/guest/login) and add a small message there and also remove the openid option since i am using ldapif i posted in the wrong place, please redirect me to the correct spaceThanksBiju

To remove the openid option in the sign-in page, you would need to login as the admiin, access the control panel > Settings > Authentication > OpenID tab and then clear the checkbox for OpenID that is selected by default. Hope that helps